Drugs, collapse and abusive therapy: the nightmare that tormented Brian Wilson in the Beach Boys

Voices. Brian Wilson the man who embodied the creative impulse of beach boys he was used to hearing voices in his head. Perhaps as the memory of a time as glorious as fateful, in which he signed hits, but at the same time had to face the pressures of the industry, in addition to the presence of his authoritarian father, Murry Wilson, who had succeeded in the group since its inception and he never hesitated to criticize Brian violently. Thus, he went from total success to absolute isolation in a very few years. In just five years, his spirit collapsed.

According to Wilson, he used to listen to the raspy voice of Phil Spector, the gritty voice of Chuck Berry, and his own father’s, always chiding him from beyond the grave.. “Phil’s voice is terrifying, always challenging me, always reminding me that he got there before anyone else. Wilson, I hear him say in my head, you’ll never get revenge. You lost that feeling of love either be my babyso don’t even try. But maybe he wants me to try”, he writes in his memoirs, the title of which sounds like an affirmation, I’m Brian Wilson and you’re not.

These voices were a challenge for Wilson. “I’ve tried to take care of them all my life. I’ve tried to ignore them, to no avail. I’ve tried to drive them away with alcohol and drugs, to no avail. They gave me all kinds of drugs and when they weren’t the right ones – which often happened – they weren’t successful either. I went to all kinds of therapies. Some were horrible and almost killed me. Others have been wonderful and have strengthened me.

In a way, Brian Wilson is a survivor. Born in Inglewood, California on June 20, 1942, he was the son of a middle-class businessman who had gone into metalwork after attempting a frustrated musical career. Noticing his precocious talent, and that of his brothers Carl and Dennis who were in tune and could sing, he encouraged them to form a band, which was joined by his cousin, Mike Love, and a neighborhood friend, Al Jardine, who knew how to good guitar riffs from Chuck Berry. This was the origin of the Beach Boys.

So, with Brian as artistic leader, the Beach Boys quickly rose to the top. . Between 1962 and 1965, he wrote and produced no less than 10 albums. A hellish pace of work, in which he summed up in one person the tasks of composer, performer and producer, which at the time were divided (in the case of the Beatles, Lennon and McCartney hardly intervened in the work of George Martin in the early years). Obsessive and perfectionist, for the days of animal soundsthe fundamental work of the group, was advised by editor Tony Asher, with experience in publicity texts.

But somehow, Wilson cut himself off from the world. He didn’t like accompanying his brothers to shows and preferred to kill hours in the studio. “During the Beach Boys era, I never liked going on stage. he wrote in his memoirs. Critics wrote about my stiffness. Then they started writing about my stage fright. I wasn’t afraid of the scene itself, I was afraid of all the eyes looking at me and the lights and the possibility of letting everyone down.”

The reality was that Wilson was hearing voices on stage. It paralyzed him. According to him, it all started when he was about 25 years old, that is to say around 1967, in the midst of the psychedelic era. “I think they started picking on me because they’re jealous. The voices in my head are jealous of me,” he said in an interview with Ability Magazine. I knew from the start that something was wrong. I took psychedelics, then about a week later I started hearing voices, and they never stopped. For a long time, I was like, ‘Oh, I can’t handle this. But I still learned to deal with it.”

Although in the band’s early years he was a staunch opponent of drugs, the open-mindedness of the youth of the time and the hardships he was beginning to experience with his father’s iron control gave to Brian the excuse to cheer himself up. with LSD… “I’ve told a lot of people not to take psychedelics. It’s mentally dangerous to take . I regret taking LSD. It’s a bad drug,” he said. rolling stones .

Inspired, Wilson wrote the album animal sounds (1966). Today an exuberant flagship of popular music (what one can say after listening God only knows), but it was just a failed album. Worse still, the commercial failure puts him at odds with a part of the group that can’t forgive him for not having a single song about girls, surfing and the beach. It sounded like music to impress the dogs, snapped a frustrated Mike Love. More with the dense instrumentation that Brian crafted layer by layer, and which ended up inspiring the The psychedelic adventure of the Beatles in Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967), which achieved the success Brian was looking for. Actually, Penny Laneis based on the clean sound of the Beach Boys.

In the next project, which was to be smile (finally published as Smiling smile ), Brian collapsed. Drugs, latent schizophrenia, industry pressures, frustration at being overtaken by rivals sent him to the canvas. He wandered around the workshop and his contribution was considerably less in later years. It’s as if little by little, the talent that once made him shine, ended up totally eclipsing him. Moreover, the band’s popularity faded with the end of the sixties.

“Well, I took a lot of amphetamines and a lot of tranquilizers. he told Ability Magazine. Cocaine and marijuana and all the rest of the stuff I’ve done really messed up my brain. He couldn’t tell fact from fantasy. The drugs will get your head dirty! If there was anything I could go back in my life and change, I wouldn’t have taken drugs. But it’s too late to turn back.”

The following years will be a nightmare. At the initiative of his wife, in 1976, Dr. Eugène Landy was hired to try to wake him up from his lethargy. A guy turned psychologist and obsessed with celebrities. For this reason, his idea was 24/7 therapy, it is a total intervention of the patient’s life. That’s how he did with Brian, until he took complete control of his existence.

As depicted in the biopic Love and Mercy (2014) Landy controlled Brian’s life with an iron fist. . This forced him to release a solo album titled simply Brian Wilson (1988), in which he appears as co-author of 8 songs. Quite a merit for someone who had no idea of ​​music. Not only that. He attempted to grab the profits from the Beach Boys, claiming that everything they generated was due to his involvement with Brian. He took him away from his brothers and although they took away his license to practice, he didn’t care and remained something of a partner to Brian. His brothers had to step in with a court order to kick him out. There, little by little, they recovered it.

But the schism between the band somehow remained. In 2012, the survivors reunited to celebrate their 50th anniversary, but after sticking to the agreed dates, Mike Love continued touring with his own band. The years passed without speaking, as if the pause left by the period between animal sounds And smile I would have buried something forever. “I feel like the same guy, but I’m not the same guy.” he told Rolling Stone. “I have the same love in my heart as when I was a kid, but I’m older, I’ve been through a lot. I’m going to sit there and say, ‘I’m a man! I’m a man. !’ It’s been a tough journey trying to get into my 23-year-old brain.”